As Election Day nears, the natives are restless

Election results

A pioneer in public-opinion research, Daniel Yankelovich is one of the nation’s most influential takers of the collective pulse, a walking, talking mood ring.

The color he sees now, with Election Day looming?

Black. Very black.

“The mood of frustration is greater than anything I’ve seen in a long time,” said Yankelovich, a La Jolla resident whose decades-long career includes launching The New York Times Poll and cofounding the nonprofit research firm Public Agenda.

He sees voters frustrated by unemployment and the sluggish economy. Frustrated by partisan bickering and political gamesmanship. Frustrated by a loss of any sense of the common good.

Voters have been frustrated before, of course. Born in 1924, Yankelovich has seen polling shadowed by World War II, assassinations, Watergate and 9/11. What he sees in the mood of voters now is a dangerous erosion of faith in our government’s ability to turn things around.

“It’s the feeling that we’re just not coming to grips with our problems,” he said.

That feeling shows up in recent poll numbers. Every year, the Field Poll asks Californians — including San Diegans — whether they believe things in the state are headed in the right direction. In the most recent poll, last month, only 12 percent said yes.

You have to go back 17 years, at the end of another recession, to find numbers that low.

“A lot of things have just gotten out of hand,” said Molly Krumweide, 47, a University City insurance broker who participated in the Field Poll. “Immigration, no jobs, cutbacks in education. It just feels like we are going backward instead of forward.”

John McClure, 72, a retired high schoolteacher from La Mesa, and also a poll participant, said he sees legislators more interested in appeasing special interests than helping the middle class. “Bottom line, they don’t really care about us,” he said.

Economic troubles traditionally bring bleak poll numbers for government leaders, and Californians see these as especially hard times. A September Field Poll that asked residents their perceptions of the economy — good, bad, mixed — found 93 percent opting for bad.

Another question asked respondents about their own financial well-being. Fifty-two percent said they were worse off than a year ago.

Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, said this was the third straight year a majority in the poll has answered “worse off” — a record for the survey question, which dates back to 1961. It’s only been as high as 50 percent one other time, in 1992.

“What’s newsworthy is the public’s perceptions about the state’s economy and their own personal well-being are now very negative,” DiCamillo said. “We’re seeing the cumulative effect of more and more people feeling affected as the election nears.”

How the public’s darkening mood will play out on Nov. 2 remains to be seen. In addition to closely watched statewide races for governor and U.S. senate, the local ballot includes controversial tax-increase initiatives.

But the gloomy outlook is already reflected in one of the election season’s biggest stories, the emergence of the Tea Party.

“The rise of political movements like the Tea Party is very characteristic of responses you see when people are frustrated by how things are going,” Yankelovich said. “In this case, a lot of it is the stagnant economy and government deficits, and it’s almost like we have the worst of both worlds: more and more deficits and no relief coming from economic growth or the restoration of jobs. It’s a formula for frustration.”

To Steve Jilka, 62, a Scripps Ranch resident who is product manager for a local computer firm, frustration comes from the way current campaigns are being waged — the negative ads, the rank partisanship.

“I’ve seen a lot of campaigns, and there have always been real schisms, but there was also more cooperation and compromise and crossing party lives to get things done,” said Jilka, who also participated in the Field Poll last month. “Now there’s just a huge amount of paranoia going on, too much hysteria. And it gets difficult to make sane choices because nobody is talking about the issues.”

Samuel Popkin, a UCSD political science professor, sees parallels in the current mood with what happened in the midterm elections of 1982 and 1994, when voters changed the ideological balance of Congress.

“People were saying then, as they are now, ‘OK, you passed all this big legislation, you promised all these changes, but we aren’t really seeing anything from it yet. The seeds were planted, but where’s the fruit on the trees?’”

He understands the lack of confidence people have now in the ability of government to solve problems. A recent Harvard/Kaiser Foundation/Washington Post survey found fewer than half the respondents believe government is up to the task, down from 60 percent eight years ago.

“The role of government in our lives is changing and shifting and we don’t yet understand how those changes will play out,” Popkin said.

Yankelovich said he is optimistic things ultimately can be turned around, that our shared mood ring will turn a different color.

“If you’ve lived through enough crises, you know there is an underlying resiliency and strength in this country and it will reassert itself,” he said.

Local residents Krumweide, McClure and Jilka said they’ll be doing a little reasserting themselves in nine days, shaking off their discouragement about the state of affairs and going to the polls to vote.

“Absolutely I’ll be there,” McClure said. “It’s my chance to show them how I feel.”